Project Highlights

Research Highlights

ISIS Overview Items

ISIS Overview Video

The ISIS Brochure

Welcome

Welcome to the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, a research organization of the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. ISIS conducts basic and applied research in the area of systems and information science and engineering. Applications of ISIS technology span a wide range of software-intensive systems from small embedded devices, through real-time distributed systems, to globally deployed complex systems. Software is increasingly essential to the functions of these systems, and it is also the primary means of adapting them to their environments and users. Our research interests lie in the theoretical foundations, modeling, design, engineering, and educational aspects of these systems.

The Linux Foundation has Announced the Launch of LF Energy,
A New Open Source Coalition

The Linux Foundation today announces the formation of LF Energy with support from RTE, Europe’s biggest transmission power systems provider, and other organizations, to speed technological innovation and transform the energy mix across the world.

LF Energy is an umbrella organization that will support and sustain multi-vendor collaboration and open source progress in the energy and electricity sectors to accelerate information and communication technologies (ICT) critical to balanced energy use and economic value.

Vanderbilt Gets Funding from NSA to Make Sure America Keeps Moving After Hacks

The National Security Agency is giving Vanderbilt University team and their collaborators five years and several million dollars to figure out how to make that happen. They’re getting what’s called a Science of Security Lablet—mini-labs aimed at increasing knowledge and collaboration in the field.

Xenofon Koutsoukos, professor of computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering, is heading up the new NSA Lablet.

Most of the Vanderbilt team is affiliated with the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, whose founding director, Janos Sztipanovits, the E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering, is a renowned researcher in the field of cyber-physical systems. He and six other Vanderbilt School of Engineering professors are on the grant, along with Jennifer Trueblood, assistant professor of psychology.

“The fusion between people, computing and the physical environment is becoming so deep that it is getting harder and harder to tell them apart,” said Janos Sztipanovits, E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering and principal investigator on the “Science of Design for Societal-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems” project. The project, co-led by Shankar Sastry at the University of California, Berkeley, Alexander Pretschner at the Technical University of Munich and Werner Damm at the University of Oldenburg, has just received a $4 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation.The potential economic rewards are enormous. According to a 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute, the ongoing digitization of industry could add as much as $1.5 trillion to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and €1 trillion to the GDP of Europe.

Several distributed power 'apps' were demonstrated March 13-15, 2018 at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, DC to showcase the Resilient Information Architecture Platform for the Smart Grid (RIAPS) - a research project supported by ARPA-E. The project is led by Professor Gabor Karsai, Institute for Software-Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, and is supported by North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Washington State University (WSU) as subcontractors. Two distributed Remedial Action Scheme (RAS) apps will be shown by WSU that ensure grid stability and resilience: one dynamically curtails a wind farm electric power output to eliminate power line overloads, while the other calculates load shedding options to prevent system collapse when the grid frequency drops. NCSU will demonstrate a microgrid control application that provides optimal and stable control during system transients, when the microgrid is being disconnected from the main grid. The microgrid app will be combined with a transactive energy app developed at Vanderbilt University with additional support from Siemens. RIAPS is the underlying enabling technology for all these apps, not unlike Android that enables a wide variety of apps for smart devices.

Prof. Taylor Johnson has joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focus is to develop formal verification techniques and software tools for cyber-physical systems (CPS).

A massive open online course, or MOOC,offered by Vanderbilt on Coursera is currently ranked as #5 on theTop 50Free Online Courses of All Time in the World out of 6000. The Introduction to Programming with MATLAB MOOC was developed by Professor Emeritus Mike Fitzpatrick and our own Akos Ledeczi.

Researchers around the globe who want to customize medical capsule robots won’t have to start from scratch – a team from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering did the preliminary work for them and is ready to share.

To say that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have had a global impact is an understatement. Vanderbilt’s role in offering popular MOOCs is well documented, but here’s a different case: This summer, Chinmaya Samal, who started halfway around the world in a MOOC by ISIS faculty, ended up doing research on our campus.

Congestion in the metropolis of Nashville has nearly doubled in the past decade and is expected to keep growing in future. Several constraints limit our ability to add more bandwidth to the roads and highways. Therefore, it is important to lessen the burden by encouraging public engagement with the public transit system.

A new massive open online course, or MOOC, is being offered by Vanderbilt that will teach computer programming for free to those with little or no previous experience. The course was developed by Professor Emeritus Mike Fitzpatrick and our own Akos Ledeczi.

Visitors to Nashville's new 1.2 million-square-foot Music City Center will find getting around the huge conference center a breeze, thanks to technology developed at the school. Billed as using the largest interior deployment of navigational beacons, the new wayfinding app was developed by Professor Jules White. See how this is just the beginning for the technology.